Formation of stripes and other patterns on sliver and other textile materials has heretofore been carried out by Vigoureux printing and the products on which such stripes have been formed are used in the fabrication of sprinkly colored woven fabrics, among others. Such Vigoureux printing is generally carried out by means of the apparatus shown in FIG. 17. Thus, the Vigoureux printing machine generally indicated by the reference numeral 430 comprises a mounting base 431, a color box 432 mounted thereon, a color supply roll 433 disposed in said color box 432, a felt roller 434 which is in pressure contact with said color supply roller 433, and an engraved roller 435 disposed in juxtaposition with said felt roller 434. In addition, a gill 436 implanted with a multiplicity of needles is mounted on said base 431. Slivers 438 are drawn out from within a plurality of cans 437, lined up horizontally on a roller 439 and fed to said gill 436 at which they are formed into a sheet-like web 440. The web is then passed between said felt roller 434 and engraved roller 435, whereby it is printed with a color paste supplied from the color box 432. The printed web is raised up by a first and a second hoisting rollers 441, 442 and swung down by an oscillating folding device 443 on a product bench 444. As illustrated in FIG. 18, the printing operation by said felt roller 434 and engraved roller 435 takes place as the sheet-like web 440 is fed between the felt roller 434 picking up the color paste and the engraved roller 435 having a spiral pattern of projections 445 on its circumferential surface so that a stripe pattern 446 is reproduced on the web under the pressure of said spiral pattern of projections 445.
The Vigoureux printing machine 430 has a long history and has been commonly employed in the manufacture of sprinkly-colored worsted yarn. However, since it is difficult to print thick textile materials with this conventional machine, the sliver 438 must be passed through a gill 436 to form a sheet-like web before being printed. Therefore, even if it is desired to increase the rate of sliver feed for an improved color printing efficiency, the passage through the gill is rate-limiting, for the gill inherently does not lend itself well to high speed production because of its construction features and, moreover, tends to cause breakage of fiber when the sliver is passed at the allowable maximum speed. The result is that the printing efficiency cannot be increased beyond a certain level. Moreover, in the above conventional Vigoureux printing machine 430, the felt on the felt roller 434 is compressed and hardened as the machine is repeatedly operated so that it becomes less and less efficient to pick up the color and as it is used over a long period of time, the shade of the print becomes not so deep as desired. Furthermore, the above machine 430 is only compatible with dry fibrous substrates and cannot be an element in a continuous production line connected to the ground dying process, thus preventing the layout of a continuous dyeing-printing plant. As the above machine thus includes a gill 436 which cannot deal with a wet ground-dyed sliver, it cannot be built into a continuous processing line along with the sliver ground-dyeing process. In this way, the conventional Vigoureux printing machine has several problems in regard to coloring efficiency, uniformity of color prints and the freedom of integration with a ground-dyeing process for material fibers such as sliver. Particularly, in the field of Vigoureux printing, technical innovation has been slow as compared with the other segments of dyeing art and an early resolution of the above-mentioned problems has been keenly demanded.